12/09/2009 @ 12:01AM

Zhu Zhus Won't Kill You

In early-December, something terrible happened in the world of the Zhu Zhu pets: Mr. Squiggles, one of four electronic hamsters, was declared unsafe. There was too much antimony in his fur, said Good Guides, a San Francisco-based environmental group that bills itself as “the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.”

Was this a catastrophe for the hottest toy of the holiday season? Was Mr. Squiggles heading back to the great toy recall store in the sky, leaving Num Nums, Chunk and Pipsqueak to gibber plaintively for their missing pal as they zoomed along poop-free trails in homes across the world?

Or was this all just a cheap stunt that would generate massive publicity for another Grinch-like environmental watchdog group dedicated to saving the holidays, one “toxic” toy at a time? After hundreds of news stories warned parents about getting cancer from Mr. Squiggles, it all turned out to be a cheap stunt.

Good Guides has had to issue an embarrassing retraction. The Consumer Product Safety Commission confirmed that Mr. Squiggles was, indeed, safe.

Though the media responded to this twist of events by correcting the record, this story would not have spread like a virus–and threatened to destroy the only toy company with a certifiable hit for children this holiday season–if the media had been paying attention to the science.

The method Good Guides used to detect antimony–a chemical used to make the toy fire resistant–only measured the chemical in the fur, and not whether the chemical migrates from the fur. So when Good Guides said that they found antimony higher than federal safety standards, they were, as one toxicologist who specializes in researching toy safety put it, comparing apples to bananas.

But this wasn’t a big secret: Good Guides’ press release explained the technology used and that it only detected the presence of a chemical. Any journalist familiar with the risk assessment protocols used by government agencies should have spotted the credibility gap between the test and the claim. All it would have taken is a phone call or an e-mail to a toxicologist to confirm that Good Guides’ warning was groundless.

Worse, a test that only determines presence amounts to deception if you use it to imply a threat to health, which, the not-so Good Guides did: “[d]epending on the level of exposure, antimony can lead to cancer, lung and heart problems and impacts on fertility.” Even in the news stories announcing that Mr. Squiggles was safe, these claims were still repeated.

So it’s worthwhile teasing out a rough quantification of how “potential” a threat antinomy is. First, you have to inhale it in relatively large quantities. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) calculates that the amount that can be inhaled per day over a lifetime without causing harm is 9 micrograms per meter cubed. This incorporates a safety factor of 1,000 on the lowest observed adverse effect level of antinomy in animals–in other words, the first statistically significant health problem in animals came from inhaling antimony at a level of 9000 micrograms per meter cubed.

The CPSC did these calculations because antimony is also used in fire retardants in mattresses. After devising experiments to simulate the aging of a mattress, the CSPC calculated that a grand total of 210 micrograms of antinomy particles of a size capable of being inhaled would be released over the course of 10 years. This amounts to 0.06 micrograms per day.

Still worried? Remember, this is from a mattress, which the CPSC estimated as being 18,200 centimeters squared of material covered in fire retardant for an adult, and 7,900 centimeters squared of material for children. You would need to upgrade Mr. Squiggles from a hamster to a pet Ox and sleep on him for 8 hours a day for a decade to simulate this negligible exposure.

Sadly, extrapolating exposure from presence is the “green” formula behind many of the seasonal scare stories about toys: First, determine the presence of a chemical; then, equate presence with exposure; and finally, equate exposure with the worst possible reaction ever attributed to the chemical at any dose in experimental research. The result of this fear by association is oodles of media coverage.

Even when news stories play it straight down the “he says, she says,” line, who, as a parent, are you going to believe: the company protesting that its toy, usually assembled in China, is just fine and dandy, or the “watchdog” group warning that it’s frighteningly dangerous and waving a test to prove it?

In the face of unreasoning, unjustified terror, there is, perhaps, only humor. When the story broke about Mr. Squiggles in the United Kingdom, one American from Jacksonville, Fla., posted the following comment after a related news story:

“Dear England, I must apologize for my idiot brethren in San Francisco. You see, in San Francisco they are afraid of everything. There is absolutely nothing that doesn’t terrify these people.”

Trevor Butterworth is the editor of STATS.org, an affiliate of George Mason Universitythat looks at how numbers are used in public policy and the media. He writes a weekly columnfor Forbes.